What is it about?
Deliberately inflicted civilian-assault warfare for conquest and its functions of heterosexual enslaving and lethal martial rape have failed to be seen as a credible mainstream norm of warfare in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. However, this religiously extremist organized violence carried out by martial cults and companies strictly of men as members became prevalent by the Bronze age. Women, children, and men trying to abide by their productive Neolithic-derived civil lifeways have regularly been its targets. Martial rape, not the mere rhetorical trope it has been called, is integral to conquest has been pivotal in turning productive independent civil groups as developed over the Neolithic into slave institutions under conquest from the Bronze age onward.
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Why is it important?
Deliberately inflicted civilian-assault warfare for conquest and its functions of heterosexual enslaving and lethal martial rape have failed to be seen as a credible mainstream norm of warfare in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. However, this religiously extremist organized violence carried out by martial cults and companies strictly of men as members became prevalent by the Bronze age. Women, children, and men trying to abide by their productive Neolithic-derived civil lifeways have regularly been its targets. Martial rape, not the mere rhetorical trope it has been called, is integral to conquest has been pivotal in turning productive independent civil groups as developed over the Neolithic into slave institutions under conquest from the Bronze age onward.
Perspectives
I hope this article helps make conquest by force, its organized sexual violence against girls and women, and its ties to the development of slavery crystal clear. My aim is to show that this aggression has been a continuous problem of martial religious extremism in a multi-branching men’s movement. Their regular ceremony has been civilian-assault warfare for conquest from the Bronze age in the Near East and Mediterranean to the global modern problem of atrocities against civil groups ideriving from the global spread of the organized religious conquest habit in later antiquity and premodernity.
Kathy Gaca
Vanderbilt University
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This page is a summary of: The Historicity and Import of Martial Rape against Girls and Women in Civilian-Assault Warfare for Conquest, November 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004749368_016.
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